Hamblin and Peterson: Anti-theists can't erase Christianity

Russian Orthodox believers brave frosty weather to stand in line outside the Christ the Savior Cathedral, in Moscow, in November 2011. Photo: Associated Press.

Militant anti-theists of the 21st
century have little good to say about religion, often
blaming it for most of the world's ills.

Few, however, seem self-reflective enough to examine the
results of militant atheism's impact on society in the
20th century. A case in point is Russia.

With the conversion of St. Vladimir, prince of Kiev, in
A.D. 988, Christianity became a central part of Russian
national identity.

Thereafter, Christianity spread throughout Russia. In
fact, after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in
1453, Russia emerged as the heartland of Eastern Orthodox
Christianity, which became central to Russian culture, in
art, architecture, music and literature.

All of this dramatically changed with the Russian
Revolution in 1917. The original broadly based revolution
was swiftly co-opted by Lenin and the Marxists, who
promised liberation not only from the feudal tyranny of
the czars but from the spiritual bondage of Christianity.

Being officially and militantly atheistic, the Leninist
regime set about completely undoing the old religious
order of Russia.

Of course, the promised peoples' paradise didn't develop.
Quite the contrary. The tyranny of the czars was replaced
by the even worse tyranny of Lenin and Stalin.

Beginning in 1917, Leninists and Stalinists set about
systematically seizing all church property and destroying
church buildings. Militantly atheistic Stalinist
totalitarianism would tolerate no competitors to the state
for the hearts and minds of the people.

The Russian Orthodox Church was, thus, not merely to be
reformed but had to be destroyed. And Stalin's commissars
were nothing if not efficient in their suppression of all
forms of dissent.

In 1931, the Stalinists obliterated the magnificent
Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, in a barbarous
act of wanton destruction.

By 1940 nearly 30,000 churches had been closed,
confiscated or destroyed; only 500 remained active in all
of the Soviet Union.

Of course this cultural vandalism was nothing compared to
the shocking human tragedy as Christians were
systematically persecuted, imprisoned and massacred.
Russian metropolitans (essentially archbishops) and
bishops were regularly murdered and tortured.

One was crucified upside down on the iconostasis of his
church. And the lower clergy didn't escape. They were
hunted down, tortured, mutilated, buried alive, shot or
fed to animals. More than 100,000 priests, monks and nuns
were killed; many others were imprisoned in gulags.

Religiously active lay Christians fared little better.
Many Christians were sent to psychiatric institutions,
since the Soviets considered religious belief a form of
mental illness. Others fled into exile. (A sense of the
intense evil of these persecutions can be found in the
writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.) The scale of this
holocaust against Christians in the Soviet Union compares
in some ways to the holocaust against Jews in Nazi
Germany.

And this assault was not merely against Christianity. The
Soviets attacked the very idea of God, in any form.

Every religious denomination was ruthlessly and bloodily
suppressed by the Stalinist commissars, including Judaism,
Islam in Central Asia, and Buddhism in Mongolia.

Even more remarkable than the vast scale of devastation,
imprisonment, torture and murder of Christians by the
Soviets is the fact that these efforts failed.

One would think that, if an ideal atheist state based on
pure reason and the rejection of religion could have grown
up anywhere, it would have been under Soviet tyranny,
which left a people with little formal religious life.

Yet despite four generations of near perpetual persecution
and of official atheistic indoctrination in Soviet
schools, Christianity survived. By 2008, some 15,000
Russian Orthodox churches had been reopened or built.

The resurrection of Russian Christianity is symbolized by
the rebuilding of the magnificent Cathedral of Christ the
Savior in Moscow in 2000, 70 years after its demolition.

Other denominations of Christianity are also flourishing
today in Russia, including The Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints, which now claims about 20,000 members.

Thus, a story that began in unthinkable horror concluded
with a demonstration of the irrepressible power of faith
and of the triumph of the human spirit.